Images of

ANTARCTICA

Crary Lab

Photos © 2002 Seth White

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I figured I'd make a little page for the Crary lab, since it is where I work most of the time. But compared to the pages I made for the Arrival Heights and Cosray buildings, it felt like I was sort of scrounging to find good pictures. This is because the Crary Lab is a newer building, and is right in the middle of McMurdo. It doesn't have the character of Cosray or the views of Arrival Heights. It is also the sacred cow of McMurdo, and it takes about 36 pages of forms to get approval to do any sort of minor work on the building itself. But it is a solidly constructed building, and operates pretty well. It is also one of the most important buildings on station since it is the hub for most of the science going on down here. So this is the front building itself, as seen from the road that passes by. It was finished in 1991 and consists of three "phases". Each phase is a long, narrow structure, and the three phases are connected by a transverse corridor that runs down a slight hill. Phase 1 has most of the offices, the freezers, chemistry labs, stockrooms, and a fan/boiler room. Phase 2 has more labs, offices and another fan/boiler room. Phase 3 has the electronics shop and the aquarium. This picture shows the front of Phase 1.

The street sign here lets you know where you are....in beaker land. Beaker is local slang for scientist, after a character from the muppets show. The person who made the sign misspelled it (intentionally?), but you get the idea.
Albert Crary was a pioneering scientist in both the Antarctic and Arctic, and was the first person to set foot on both poles. This photo and placque are on the wall near the main entrance to the lab. Buck Wilson, of the infrasound group at U. of Alaska, was on a long traverse with Bert Crary during the IGY in 1957-1958. He is quite modest about his time spent down here, but along the way he was awarded a medal for helping to save Crary's life after part of an ice shelf calved off into the ocean underneath him. He speaks quite well of Crary.
This display case, also near the main entrance, has a few odds and ends from around here...Erebus crystals, biological specimens, petrified wood, fossils, etc.
Here's my office: Crary 111. It's convenient, actually. My office is 111, the phone number is 4111, and by sheer coincidence, my pager number is 411. My office is *slightly* messy, which was a source of contention over the summer between myself and management. At the start of the season, an edict was proclaimed by NSF that there was to be no personalization of workspaces whatsoever. This mindset, naturally, did not take strong root in the McMurdo community - or me. And over the winter, it has gotten a bit more disheveled. Also I think my camera is having issues lately - this and other pictures on this page shouldn't be so grainy. First order of business when I get to Christchurch NZ on the way home is to buy a new digital camera. Or maybe I should just get online and order one to get sent down at Winfly next month? Alright, I'm babbling now. And in case you were wondering, those wine and beer bottle are, in fact, decorative. The wine bottle especially is interesting - it's the McMurdo pinot gris, bottled by a NZ winery with a McMurdo Station label. The same winery also makes a white wine with a Scott Base label. I snagged a few of these for souvenirs, naturally. The other bottle is a brand of beer named "Holy Grail Ale"...with the selling point "Tempered over burning witches". Ha. I found this in a NZ pub on the way down and just had to have it.
A problem for many buildings on campus (er, I mean on station) is snow blowing in through small cracks in the sealing around windows and doors. Unless the joints are very well sealed, the intensity of the wind will drive snow right through. This is the inside face of a window on a loading dock door at Crary.
This is the giant green laser which is the heart of the LIDAR system. LIDAR stands for LIght Detection And Ranging, and this system is one of the projects under the science tech domain. It uses laser light to measure the existence of Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC's). The laser is sent out straight up from the Crary lab, and a nearby telescope collects the small amounts of light returned from the atmosphere. By examining the amplitude and polarization (or lack thereof) of the returning light, PSC's can be detected. The PSC's form during the winter season at altitudes around 15-25 km, and play a large role in the formation of the seasonal ozone hole, which is created every spring. This system is actually overseen by an Italian group from Rome, but they cannot operate this at Terra Nova Bay (nearby Italian base) because it is a winter measurement and their station operates during the summer only. So it's here at Crary, and is well-known throughout town. When blowing snow is present, the laser lights up like this....and extends as far as you can see. However, the signals on days like this are very crappy - clear days are best for this measurement.
Clear days are the best for LIDAR measurements, but on such days you can't really see the laser itself. When there is blowing snow or fog in the air, the laser lights up the snow or water droplets and is a very impressive sight (however such days are not so good for the measurements themselves). One day last month, Paola Massoli (here from Italy for Winfly), myself, my buddy Dave, and a couple other people were at the bar. It was foggy outside, and I had been meaning to start up the laser so Dave and I could take pictures on one of these days. So we decided to go over and start it up. I had taken pictures of the laser earlier in the year, but since I used my old camera without a tripod the pictures turned out awful. This time, much much much better.
Another one of the laser with Crary in the background.
Looking through the laser out toward the SSC (science support center) building.
The laser fires ten times per second, so I did 1/15 second exposure and caught a single pulse of the laser. I like the way this one turned out. It was kind of surreal to stand on the catwalk of Crary and see this stream of green particles dancing in front of me. If I breathed into the laser, it would become solid, bright green as it lit up the cloud of my breath. If I put my glove over the laser, the water droplets on the glove would crackle and pop with each pulse.
This one is a little overexposed, but the colors really jump out.
A pic of just the Crary building, with the fog and smoke rising in the background.
This is the LIDAR setup itself. The laser is housed in the middle red box and is powered by the red rack at left. The beam comes out along the axis of the laser box and is directed upward by a mirror (out of view) and out through a hole in a ceiling window. After scattering off particles and air molecules in the atmosphere, some of the light returns back through the ceiling window and is collected by the cylindrical green telescope on the right. The signals from the photomultiplier tubes then go to.....
....the oscilloscope on top of this equipment rack. The rack houses various power supplies and signal processing equipment. The data is then stored on the olde-tyme computer to the right and FTP'd to the science group in Italy.
In case you speak Italian, here are some instructions posted near the LIDAR system....
This little station sits in a corner in Phase 2 of Crary and is one of my projects. It's part of a worldwide network of GPS stations which simultaneously track both GPS and GLONASS satellites. GLONASS is the Russian counterpart of the American GPS network, and by using data from both groups of satellites, greater precision and coverage can be obtained. The trick is to do this using one receiver - which has to be "bilingual". The International Glonass Service (IGLOS) pilot project has worked with a GPS receiver manufacturer to produce such a receiver, and this project has been quite successful. The green receiver on top of the computer is hooked up to an antenna on the top of the building and (together with the computer) they comprise the IGLOS station designated CRAR. More about the IGLOS project here.
This is the hub room for the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory, run by New Mexico Tech. A network of seismic sensors on the mountain sends data back to this room where it is stored and transmitted to the US. The crater camera also comes into this room. More about this project is here and photos from several of the actual sites on Mt. Erebus are here.
This is a nice display set up by the MEVO team last year outside of the hub room. Live video from the crater camera can be shown on the TV, live seismic signals are shown on the middle monitor, and video clips of "Erebus' Greatest Hits", i.e. spectacular eruptions caught on film by the crater camera, can be played on the rightmost computer.
Here are Rich Degnan and Ed Geddie, the two winter-over technicians and overall good guys who run the NASA satellite tracking station (see here). The station can almost completely be controlled from this office in Crary Phase 2.
This is another office in Crary Phase 2, dedicated to the balloon project. This project is a unique one for several reasons. First, the business of launching and tracking balloons is quite different from the other projects I'm involved in, which are continuously-running, stationary systems. Second, unlike most of the other systems, much of the equipment is literally Radio Shack quality, and most of it is very old. I defy you to identify the computer on the desk here! Everything from the antennas, antenna controllers, computer, modem, tape recorder (used as backup to the computer), to the audio cassette tapes themselves (which are recycled year after year) are ancient and untrustworthy. Consequently, we have had problems getting all this stuff to work reliably and repeatably. But most problems have been ironed out (mostly by Olivia) and the balloon launch campaign for this winter has gone reasonably well. We have launched about 13 balloons so far (as of July 21), and have only failed to receive data from one flight (and half of another one). That ain't bad! In fact, I'm guessing McMurdo is ahead of the other 8 stations which are participating in this unique and large-scale winter balloon campaign.
More of the hardware for this project. I probably shouldn't gripe so much about the equipment because in all fairness, a large majority of the systems I work on are reasonably well designed and reliable. Especially lately, every one of them has been very well-behaved. Of course, I probably just jinxed myself. Issues with my projects tend to come in waves, where several of them will have temper tantrums at once. I'm probably due....
During early September, we had a killer storm. It was condition 1 for a couple days, and not just marginal condition 1, but full force. It was the most violent storm I've seen here. On the night the storm was growing, I was actually having a glass of wine in the coffee house. I heard from reliable sources at the bar that the weather people were getting ready to call condition 1, but I didn't pay any attention to it. Heck, I'll just stay and drink wine until it passes! Wrong! As it turns out, there is a rule here that the bartender can't serve any more during condition 1. And, he/she/it can't let anyone leave or else trouble will follow for them. Crap! The coffee house is only ~100 yards from building 155 where I live....but I was stuck there with nothing to do and nothing to drink. I didn't even have the foresight to buy a bottle of wine ahead of time. Dang! So we all had to wait there while the SAR (search and rescue) team assembled. In this type of situation, they get together and then go around to the various places where people are "stranded" and walk us back to our dorms. So they finally arrived, we took a headcount, and then set off. It was, without question, the most intense weather I've been in. None of us were ever in danger, and any of us could have certainly made it back to our dorms without a problem. But...the weather was so cold, wet, and furious that if you were out by yourself and somehow managed to fall down and hurt yourself, you might be in some trouble. The visibility was absolutely nil. Maybe 15 feet. The wind was howling with incredible force. And since the recent weather had been calm, there was lots of snow to blow around. So in addition to the low visibility, the wind chill was exaggerated due to the ice particles. This was no joke. Earlier in the day, I drove out to Cosray along the Scott Base road. It was only condition 2 then, so I radio checked out from town and drove out without worry. I had about 1.5 hours of work to do there...and when I left it had gotten significantly worse. It was still condition 2, so I just called in on the radio. But on the way back there were a few spots where I couldn't see a damn thing. Literally. A particularly bad spot is a narrow point between Ob Hill and the foot of Crater Hill, where the wind accelerates as it's funneled through. I had to stop the truck and sit until the gusts subsided for a few seconds and I could see where I was going. It wasn't a serious situation, though. I had driven the road hundreds of times before and knew that the fuel lines running over "the pass" on their way to Williams Field would provide direction. The Scott Base road runs along a hill, with a dropoff on the west side. The fuel lines are on the east side, so I just stayed close to them (when I could see). But it was very slow going. Up until this point, I had never been off station during such severe weather. I had gotten stuck at Cosray and Arrival Heights in condition 1, but nothing like this. It took about 20 minutes to drive back to Crary. The next day the storm was still blowing, although its intensity was going up and down. Here's a pic from a Crary window. It's looking out between Phase 1 and Phase 2. There is currently a massive snowdrift here, most of which was formed during this storm. This was actually a lull in the storm.
Here's one from a Crary window when the storm was stronger. Later during the first night, I stepped outside building 155 to have a look. I walked a ways out into the tempest and was just awestruck. The power of this place is unimaginable. I probably will never see such a thing again. The fury of a serious storm here is a thing to be respected. If you are not well equipped and prepared, you will not last long if you run into trouble in such weather.
And here's one of the loading dock door in Phase 2. It's unbelievable how much snow can be driven though the tiniest cracks in sealing by the winds here. No snowball fights inside Crary ensued after this, though. Not a one! That would have been against policy!!!!